Pitchfork

The Melvins have spent most of their 20-year lifespan as a historical footnote in many people's minds, due to the debt owed them by most of the original grunge bands in the Pacific Northwest, including Nirvana-- Kurt Cobain and Melvins singer King Buzzo knew each other as kids in Aberdeen. But as Buzz Osborne occasionally points out in interviews, the Melvins are still around, and those other bands mostly aren't.

What's more, the Melvins existed long before their big-name proteges, recording their first songs around 1983. Segue: those primeval tracks are about to see their first official release as Mangled Demos, due out June 14 via Ipecac Records. The demos involved seriously predate the band's first EP (that would be 1986) and reportedly sit halfway between early 80s hardcore and the Melvins' familiar slow, swampy sound. We tried just running a recent Melvins record at double speed to get an idea of what that would sound like, but it gave one of the interns some kind of seizure, so we grudgingly turned it off.

The new CD features several songs whose titles got lost somewhere in the last 22 years; rather than making up new ones, the Melvins appear to have assigned them little graphical doodles, which makes the following tracklist a bit of a bitch to reprint. Meanwhile, some songs are included twice, and others run together, producing a total of 18 tracks that, in some abstract sense, look like this:

01 Elks Lodge Christmas Broadcast
02 If You Get Bored - live radio
03 Forgotten Principles
04 Snake Appeal
05 [flower]
06 If You Get Bored
07 Set Me Straight
08 [communist star]
09 I'm Dry
10 Forgotten Principles
11 I Don't Know
12 Matt-Alec
13 The REAL You
14 Run Around
15 Keep Away From Me
16 [clover]
17 Bibulous Confabulation (during rehearsal)
18 [iron cross]
19 [pencil]
20 Matt-Alec
21 "Walter"
22 [broken scissors]
23 [airplane]

The association between the Melvins and Ipecac Records owner Mike Patton goes back farther than this record; Ipecac has put out six other Melvins records since 1999, starting with The Maggot, The Bootlicker, and The Crybaby, a trilogy all recorded together, and two band members have recently played in outside projects with Patton-- new bassist Kevin Rutmanis in Tomahawk, and Buzz Osbourne in Fantomas, who are touring through the end of April.